Forfeit

6

Time was running short, Tally-wise. With their deadline only two days ahead I went to Heathbury Park races on Saturday to meet Dermot Finnegan, an undistinguished jockey with an undistinguished mount in the Lamplighter.

For a while I couldn’t understand a word he said, so impenetrable was his Irish accent. After he had sipped unenthusiastically at a cup of lunch counter coffee for ten minutes he relaxed enough to tell me he always spoke worse when he was nervous, and after that we got by with him having to repeat some things twice, but not four or five times, as at the beginning.

Once past the language barrier, Dermot unveiled a resigned wit and an accepting contented way of life. Although by most standards his riding success was small, Dermot thought it great. His income, less than a dustman’s, seemed to him princely compared with the conditions of his childhood. His father had fed fourteen children on the potatoes he had grown on two and a half exhausted acres. Dermot, being neither the strong eldest nor the spoilt youngest, had usually had to shove for his share and hadn’t always got it. At nineteen he tired of the diet and took his under-developed physique across the sea to Newmarket, where an Irish accent, irrespective of previous experience, guaranteed him an immediate job in the labour-hungry racing industry.

He had ‘done his two’ for a while in a flat racing stable, but couldn’t get a ride in a flat race because he hadn’t been apprenticed. Philosophically he moved down the road to a stable which trained jumpers as well, where the ‘Governor’ gave him a chance in a couple of hurdle races. He still worked in the same stable on a part-time basis, and the ‘Governor’ still put him up as his second string jockey. How many rides? He grinned, showing spaces instead of teeth. Some seasons, maybe thirty. Two years ago, of course, it was only four, thanks to breaking his leg off a brainless divil of a knock-kneed spalpeen.

Dermot Finnegan was twenty-five, looked thirty. Broken nosed and weatherbeaten, with bright sharp blue eyes. His ambition, he said, was to take a crack at Aintree. Otherwise he was all right with what he had: he wouldn’t want to be a classy top jockey, it was far too much responsibility. ‘If you only ride the scrubbers round the gaffs at the back end of the season, see, no one expects much. Then they gets a glorious surprise if you do come in.’

He had ridden nineteen winners in all, and he could remember each of them in sharp detail. No, he didn’t think he would do much good in the Lamplighter, not really, as he was only in it because his stable was running three. ‘I’ll be on the pacemaker, sure. You’ll see me right up there over the first, and maybe for a good while longer, but then my old boy will run out of steam and drop out of the back door as sudden as an interrupted burglar, and if I don’t have to pull him up it’ll be a bloody miracle.’

Later in the afternoon I watched him start out on some prospective ten-year-old dog-meat in a novice chase. Horse and rider disappeared with a flurry of legs into the second open ditch, and when I went to check on his injuries some time after the second race I met Dermot coming out of the ambulance room wearing a bandage and a grin.

‘It’s only a scratch’ he assured me cheerfully. ‘I’ll be there for the Lamplighter sure enough.’

Further investigation led to the detail of a finger nail hanging on by a thread. ‘Some black divil’ had leant an ill-placed hoof on the Finnegan hand.

To complete the Tally round-up I spent the last half of the afternoon in the Clerk of the Course’s office, watching him in action.

Heathbury Park, where the Lamplighter was to be held a fortnight later, had become under his direction one of the best organised courses in the country. Like the handicapper, he was ex-forces, in his case R.A.F., which was unusual in that the racing authorities as a rule leant heavily towards the Army and the Navy for their executives.

Wing Commander Willy Ondroy was a quiet effective shortish man of forty-two who had been invalided out after fracturing his skull in a slight mishap with a Vulcan bomber. He still, he said, suffered from blackouts, usually at the most inconvenient, embarrassing and even obscene moments.

It wasn’t until after racing had finished for the day that he was really ready to talk, and even then he dealt with a string of people calling into his office with statistics, problems and keys.

The Lamplighter was his own invention, and he was modestly proud of it. He’d argued the Betting Levy Board into putting up most of the hefty stake money, and then drawn up entry conditions exciting enough to bring a gleam to the hardest-headed trainer’s eye. Most of the best horses would consequently be coming. They should draw an excellent crowd. The gate receipts would rise again. They’d soon be able to afford to build a warm modern nursery room, their latest project, to attract young parents to the races by giving them somewhere to park their kids.

Willy Ondroy’s enthusiasm was of the enduring, not the bubbling kind. His voice was as gentle as the expression in his amber eyes, and only the small self-mockery in his smile gave any clue to the steel within. His obvious lack of any need to assert his authority in any forceful way was finally explained after I’d dug, or tried to dig, into his history. A glossed over throw-away phrase about a spot of formation flying turned out to be his version of three years as a Red Arrow, flying two feet away from the jet pipe of the aircraft in front. ‘We did two hundred displays in one year,’ he said apologetically. ‘Entertaining at air shows. Like a concert party on Blackpool pier, no difference really.’

He had been lucky to transfer to bombers when he was twenty-six, he said. So many R.A.F. fighter and formation pilots were grounded altogether when their reaction times began to slow. He’d spent eight years on bombers, fifteen seconds knowing he was going to crash, three weeks in a coma, and twenty months finding himself a civilian job. Now he lived with his wife and twelve-year-old twins in a house on the edge of the racecourse, and none of them wanted to change.

I caught the last train when it was moving and made a start on Dermot and Willy Ondroy on the way back to London.

Mrs Woodward departed contentedly at a quarter to seven, and I found she had for once left steaks ready in the kitchen. Elizabeth was in good spirits. I mixed us a drink each and relaxed in the armchair, and only after a strict ten minutes of self denial asked her casually if her mother had telephoned.

‘No, she hasn’t.’ She wouldn’t have.

‘So you don’t know if she’s coming?’

‘I expect she’ll ring, if she doesn’t.’

‘I suppose so,’ I said. Damn her eyes, couldn’t she at least settle it, one way or another?

Trying to shut my mind to it I worked on the Tally article: cooked the supper: went back to Tally: stopped to settle Elizabeth for the night; and returned to the typewriter until I’d finished. It was then half past two. A pity, I thought, stretching, that I wrote so slowly, crossed out so much. I put the final version away in a drawer with only the fair copy to be typed the next day. Plenty of time for that even if I spent the rest of it on the primrose path making tracks for Gail.

I despised myself. It was five before I slept.

Elizabeth’s mother came. Not a sniffle in sight.

I had spent all morning trying to reconcile myself to her nonappearance at ten-fifteen, her usual time of arrival. As on past occasions, I had turned a calm and everyday face to Elizabeth and found I had consciously to stifle irritation at little tasks for her that normally I did without thought.

At ten-seventeen the door bell rang, and there she was, a well groomed good-looking woman in her mid-fifties with assisted tortoiseshell hair and a health farm figure. When she showed surprise at my greeting I knew I had been too welcoming. I damped it down a little to more normal levels and saw that she felt more at home with that.

I explained to her, as I had already done to Elizabeth, that I still had people to interview for Tally, and by ten-thirty I was walking away down the mews feeling as though a safety valve was blowing fine. The sun was shining too. After a sleepless night, my conscience slept.

Gail met me at Virginia Water, waiting outside in the estate car. ‘The train’s late,’ she said calmly, as I sat in beside her. No warm, loving, kissing hello. Just as well, I supposed.

‘They work on the lines on Sunday. There was a delay at Staines.’

She nodded, let in the clutch, and cruised the three quarters of a mile to her uncle’s house. There she led the way into the sitting-room and without asking poured two beers.

‘You aren’t writing today,’ she said, handing me the glass.

‘No.’

She gave me a smile that acknowledged the purpose of my visit. More businesslike about sex than most women. Certainly no tease. I kissed her mouth lightly, savouring the knowledge that the deadline of the Huntersons’ return was three full hours ahead.

She nodded as if I’d spoken. ‘I approve of you,’ she said.

‘Thanks.’

She smiled, moving away. Her dress that day was of a pale cream colour which looked wonderful against the gilded coffee skin. She was no darker, in fact, than many southern Europeans or heavily sun-tanned English: her mixed origin was distinct only in her face. A well proportioned, attractive face, gathering distinction from the self assurance within. Gail, I imagined, had had to come to terms with herself much earlier and more basically than most girls. She had done almost too good a job.

A copy of the Sunday Blaze lay on the low table, open at the sports page. Editors or sub-editors write all the headlines, and Luke-John had come up with a beauty. Across the top of my page, big and bold, it said ‘Don’t back Tiddely Pom — YET’. Underneath, he’d left in word for word every paragraph I’d written. This didn’t necessarily mean he thought each word was worth its space in print, but was quite likely because there weren’t too many advertisements that week. Like all newspapers, the Blaze lived on advertising: if an advertiser wanted to pay for space, he got it, and out went the deathless prose of the columnists. I’d lost many a worked on sentence to the late arrival of spiels on Whosit’s cough syrup or Wammo’s hair tonic. It was nice to see this intact.

I looked up at Gail. She was watching me.

‘Do you always read the sports page?’ I asked.

She shook her head. ‘Curiosity,’ she said. ‘I wanted to see what you’d written. That article... it’s disturbing.’

‘It’s meant to be.’

‘I mean, it leaves the impression that you know a great deal more than you’ve said, and it’s all bad, if not positively criminal.’

‘Well,’ I said, ‘it’s always nice to hear one has done exactly what one has intended.’

‘What usually happens when you write in this way?’

‘Repercussions? They vary from a blast from the racing authorities about minding my own business to abusive letters from nut cases.’

‘Do wrongs get righted?’

‘Very occasionally.’

‘Sir Galahad,’ she mocked.

‘No. We sell more papers. I apply for a raise.’

She laughed with her head back, the line of her throat leading tautly down into her dress. I put out my hand and touched her shoulder, suddenly wanting no more talk.

She nodded at once, smiling, and said, ‘Not on the rug. More comfortable upstairs.’

Her bedroom furnishings were pretty but clearly Sarah’s work. Fitted cupboards, a cosy armchair, book shelves, a lot of pale blue carpet, and a single bed.

At her insistence, I occupied it first. Then while I watched, like the time before, she took off her clothes. The simple, undramatised, unselfconscious undressing was more ruthlessly arousing than anything one could ever pay to see. When she had finished she stood still for a moment near the window, a pale bronze naked girl in a shaft of winter sun.

‘Shall I close the curtains?’

‘Whichever you like.’

She screwed my pulse rate up another notch by stretching up to close them, and then in the mid-day dusk she came to bed.

At three she drove me back to the station, but a train pulled out as we pulled in. We sat in the car for a while, talking, waiting for the next one.

‘Do you come home here every night?’ I asked.

‘Quite often not. Two of the other teachers share a flat, and I sleep on their sofa a night or two every week, after parties, or a theatre, maybe.’

‘But you don’t want to live in London all the time?’

‘D’you think it’s odd, that I stay with Harry and Sarah? Quite frankly, it’s because of money. Harry won’t let me pay for living here. He says he wants me to stay. He’s always been generous. If I had to pay for everything myself in London my present standard of living would go down with a reverberating thump.’

‘Comfort before independence,’ I commented mildly.

She shook her head. ‘I have both.’ After a considering pause she said, ‘Do you live with your wife? I mean, have you separated, or anything?’

‘No, we’ve not separated.’

‘Where does she think you are today?’

‘Interviewing someone for my Tally article.’

She laughed. ‘You’re a bit of a bastard.’

Nail on the head. I agreed with her.

‘Does she know you have... er... outside interests? Has she ever found you out?’

I wished she would change the subject. However, I owed her quite a lot, at least some answers, which might be the truth and nothing but the truth, but would certainly not be the whole truth.

‘She doesn’t know,’ I said.

‘Would she mind?’

‘Probably.’

‘But if she won’t... sleep with you... well, why don’t you leave her?’

I didn’t answer at once. She went on, ‘You haven’t any children, have you?’ I shook my head. ‘Then what’s to stop you? Unless, of course, you’re like me.’

‘How do you mean?’

‘Staying where the living is good. Where the money is.’

‘Oh...’ I half laughed, and she misunderstood me.

‘How can I blame you,’ she sighed, ‘When I do it myself? So your wife is rich...’

I thought about what Elizabeth would have been condemned to without me: to hospital ward routine, hospital food, no privacy, no gadgets, no telephone, lights out at nine and lights on at six, no free will at all, for ever and ever.

‘I suppose you might say,’ I agreed slowly, ‘that my wife is rich.’

Back in the flat I felt split in two, with everything familiar feeling suddenly unreal. Half my mind was still down in Surrey. I kissed Elizabeth and thought of Gail. Depression had clamped down like drizzle in the train and wouldn’t be shaken off.

‘Some man wants to talk to you,’ Elizabeth said. ‘He telephoned three times. He sounded awfully angry.’

‘Who?’

‘I couldn’t understand much of what he said. He was stuttering.’

‘How did he get our number?’ I was irritated, bored; I didn’t want to have to deal with angry men on the telephone. Moreover our number was ex-directory, precisely so that Elizabeth should not be bothered by this sort of thing.

‘I don’t know. But he did leave his number for you to ring back, it was the only coherent thing he said.’

Elizabeth’s mother handed me a note pad on which she had written down the number.

‘Victor Roncey,’ I said.

‘That’s right,’ agreed Elizabeth with relief. ‘That sounds like it.’

I sighed, wishing that all problems, especially those of my own making, would go away and leave me in peace.

‘Maybe I’ll call him later,’ I said. ‘Right now I need a drink.’

‘I was just going to make some tea,’ said Elizabeth’s mother reprovingly, and in silent fury I doubled the quantity I would normally have taken. The bottle was nearly empty. Gloomy Sunday.

Restlessly I took myself off into my writing room and started the clean unscribbled-on retype for Tally, the mechanical task eventually smoothing out the rocky tensions of my guilt-ridden return home. I couldn’t afford to like Gail too much, and I did like her. To come to love someone would be too much hell altogether. Better not to visit Gail again. I decided definitely not to. My body shuddered in protest, and I knew I would.

Roncey rang again just after Elizabeth’s mother had left.

‘What the devil do you mean about this... this trash in the paper? Of course my horse is going to run. How dare you... how dare you suggest there’s anything shady going on?’

Elizabeth had been right: he was stuttering still, at seven in the evening. He took a lot of calming down to the point of admitting that nowhere in the article was it suggested that he personally had anything but good honest upright intentions.

‘The only thing is, Mr Roncey, as I said in the article, that some owners have in the past been pressurized into not running their horses. This may even happen to you. All I was doing was giving punters several good reasons why they would be wiser to wait until half an hour before big races to put their money on. Better a short starting price than losing their money in a swindle.’

‘I’ve read it,’ he snapped. ‘Several times. And no one, believe me, is going to put any pressure on me.’

‘I very much hope not,’ I said. I wondered whether his antipathy to his elder sons extended to the smaller ones; whether he would risk their safety or happiness for the sake of running Tiddely Pom in the Lamplighter. Maybe he would. The stubborn streak ran through his character like iron in granite.

When he had calmed down to somewhere near reason I asked him if he’d mind telling me how he’d got my telephone number.

‘I had the devil’s own job, if you want to know. All that ex-directory piffle. The enquiries people refused point blank to tell me, even though I said it was urgent. Stupid, I call it, but I wasn’t to be put off by that. If you want to know, your colleague on the paper told me. Derrick Clark.’

‘I see,’ I said resignedly, thinking it unlike Derry to part so easily with my defences. ‘Well, thank you. Did the Tally photographer find you all right?’

‘He came on Friday. I hope you haven’t said anything in Tally about...’ His anger was on its way up again.

‘No,’ I said decisively. ‘Nothing like that at all.’

‘When can I be sure?’ He sounded suspicious.

‘That edition of Tally is published on the Tuesday before the Lamplighter.’

‘I’ll ask for an advance copy from the Editor. Tomorrow. I’ll demand to see what you’ve written.’

‘Do that,’ I agreed. Divert the buck to Arnold Shankerton. Splendid.

He rang off still not wholly pacified. I dialled Derry’s number and prepared to pass the ill temper along to him.

‘Roncey?’ He said indignantly. ‘Of course I didn’t give your number to Roncey.’ His baby girl was exercising her lungs loudly in the background. ‘What did you say?’

‘I said, who did you give it to?’

‘Your wife’s uncle.’

‘My wife hasn’t got any uncles.’

‘Oh Christ. Well, he said he was your wife’s uncle, and that your wife’s aunt had had a stroke, and that he wanted to tell you, but he’d lost your number.’

‘Lying crafty bastard,’ I said with feeling. ‘And he accused me of misrepresenting facts.’

‘I’m sorry, Ty.’

‘Never mind. Only check with me first, next time, huh? Like we arranged.’

‘Yeah. Sure. Sorry.’

‘How did he get hold of your number, anyway?’

‘It’s in the Directory of the British Turf, unlike yours. My mistake.’

I put the receiver back in its special cradle near to Elizabeth’s head and transferred to the armchair, and we spent the rest of the evening as we usually did, watching the shadows on the goggle box. Elizabeth never tired of it, which was a blessing, though she complained often about the shut-downs in the day time between all the child-orientated programmes. Why couldn’t they fill them, she said, with interesting things for captive adults.

Later I made some coffee and did the vapour rubs and other jobs for Elizabeth, all with a surface of tranquil domesticity, going through my part with my thoughts somewhere else, like an actor at the thousandth performance.

On the Monday morning I took my article to the Tally offices and left the package at the reception desk, virtuously on the deadline.

After that I caught the race train to Leicester, admitting to myself that although it was technically my day off I did not want to stay in the flat. Also the Huntersons’ raffle horse Egocentric was to have its pre-Lamplighter warm-up, which gave me an excellent overt reason for the journey.

Raw near-mist was doing its best to cancel the proceedings and only the last two fences were visible. Egocentric finished fourth without enough steam left to blow a whistle, and the jockey told the trainer that the useless bugger had made a right bloody shambles of three fences on the far side and couldn’t jump for peanuts. The trainer didn’t believe him and engaged a different jockey for the Lamplighter. It was one of those days.

The thin Midland crowd of cloth caps and mufflers strewed the ground with betting slips and newspapers and ate a couple of hundredweight of jellied eels out of little paper cups. I adjourned to the bar with a colleague from the Sporting Life, and four people commented on my non-starters with varying degrees of belief. Not much of a day. One, on the whole, to forget.

The journey home changed all that. When I forget it, I’ll be dead.